I love snowflakes – don’t know why but I love them as stitching designs, particularly blackwork designs and have spent most of this year stitching snowflake ornaments to give as my Xmas cards to close friends.

Last Xmas I bought some stick on snowflake motifs for my windows and managed to keep them on despite the kid’s protests that they should come down in 12th night! I maintain they are winter not Xmas decorations and can stay up till Spring. This year I added to the stock and now have lots of pretty snowflakes on the doors leading out into the garden. Very appropriate for this type of weather!

This week we have of course had real snow so I thought I would add to my snow pictures with these taken on Tuesday. This was a much nicer day than Monday as it had stopped snowing by then and the sun was out and everything was looking very Xmas card scenery . Even had a little robin stop by the bird table but didn’t get the camera out quick enough to capture that.

Despite the fact that I do have lots and lots of snowflake patterns already in my files that I haven’t stitched I could not resist two more sets that I have just bought from the wonderful Seba Designs site – scroll halfway down the page to see not one but two sets of snowflakes. Snowflake heaven and all for a very bargainsome £7!

In between other stitching I have been working on a series of designs I first saw last year – the wonderful Helga Mandl’s Xmas trees – each tree spells out a word if you look at it on its side – the pic below shows my first attempts at the Noel (on white sparkly Aida) and Joy (on red and gold fleck Aida). These are very easy to do and will make fab ornaments for next year’s round of Xmas gifts backed with some of the fabric from my stash.

Pics taken with new camera which is working out very well so far – seems to be much better at close up pics and has a nice wide viewing screen at the back – always useful.

Well tomorrow will be day 4 of wearing wellies to go out here at snow central – more is forecast at some point – it is slowly melting on major roads but we are still in a little white world of our own!

Am off to the Stitch and Creative Crafts show in Manchester on Sunday with Ellie – little girlie day out for a couple of textile junkies so am really looking forward to that.